With over 350 visual effects shots, True Grit represents the fourth collaboration between Luma Pictures and directors Joel and Ethan Coen. We take a look at some of Luma’s key invisible effects for the film.
True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) who purses her father’s killer with the reluctant help of U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) and Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon). For scenes taking place during the late 1800s in the town of Fort Smith, Arkansas, production shot on location in Granger, Texas. Luma digitally created buildings to bring the locations into the appropriate setting. “They shot a small section of the town, about a block,” explains Luma visual effects supervisor Vincent Cirelli. “We did a lot of research of turn of the century-type structures, and essentially recreated a digital version of the town under the Coens’ direction.”
Artists replaced modern buildings, removed aged trees and extended streets where necessary and added characters, animals and other set pieces into the scenes. A buildings ‘toolkit’ allowed Luma to propagate the town with appropriate models and textures for the Western era. “We have built our own hero and modeling asset system that works within Maya,” says Richard Sutherland, CG supervisor. “It allows us to very quickly reference in models and place them along a landscape, and dynamically update the landscape as we progress the individual models in parallel.” The buildings were lit and rendered in mental ray, and composited along with volumetrics like smoke for atmosphere in Nuke.
Luma’s visual effects also extended into digital creature and augmentation work. At one point, Mattie falls into a snake-filled chasm and is bitten before she can escape. “The snakes were the more intense portion of our work,” says Luma visual effects producer Steve Griffith. “For almost everything else we had practical reference from on set, but we had to come up with the look of the snakes on our own.”
To help with movement, scales and lighting reference, a snake wrangler brought some of the animals into Luma’s studio. “We had real rattlesnakes congregating in our conference room which gave us some beautiful reference,” says animation supervisor Raphael Pimentel. “The snakes had to hold up very close to camera at 4K.”
Luma created a binding system for the snakes based on the gathered reference. “As the snake bends the scales actually do move further apart, instead of just having a tube that’s bound to a skeleton,” explains Cirelli. “The scales on the snake were hundreds of instanced pieces of geometry that spread apart and react appropriately based on how the snake moves, rather than just a contiguous piece of geo with a texture, or displacement.”
Luma also contributed visual effects for scenes featuring Mattie’s horse Little Blackie. “When the horse is crossing the river,” says Cirelli, “we did replacements on the horse’s head to show that it’s having a difficult time crossing the river. It’s twitching, it’s ears are moving, he’s snarling. We added a lot of breath, sweat and saliva too.” Later, Little Blackie is exhausted from crossing the country with snake-bitten Mattie and Cogburn on its back, and eventually lays down and dies. Some of the dying shots necessitated fur simulation and a complete digital replacement of the horse used on set. For some wide pull-back shots of the horse from Mattie’s POV as she is carried away, Luma created a sequence of shots that are entirely digital.
Shots of the crossing sequence required further digital augmentation when it was realised the river as filmed was too calm on the day of the shoot for the dramatic action that was to be portrayed. “We ended up doing fluid simulations and particle work inside of Maya, rendered through Mental Ray and Krakatoa, then comped in Nu ke, just to make the river more turbulent,” notes Cirelli. In a few of the river scenes, the entire river was completely replaced with turbulent CG water.
Additional Luma contributions included environmental effects such as snow, dust and smoke, as well as breath, blood and even augmented human fingers. “I think the post production supervisor on the film told me it was the most amount of visual effects in any of the Coen Brothers’ films to date,” recalled Luma executive visual effects supervisor Payam Shohadai. “Even so, none of the effects draw attention to themselves and always remained part of the story, which was always the intention.”
Credit List
Production
Bob Graf – Producer
Catherine Farrell – Post Production supervisor
Katie McQuerrey – Associate Editor
Paramount Pictures
Stephanie Allen – VP Visual Effects
Luma Pictures
Vincent Cirelli – VFX Supervisor
Steve Griffith – VFX Producer
Richard Sutherland – CG Supervisor
Raphael A. Pimentel – Animation Supervisor
Steven Swanson – VFX Supervising Producer
